macOS text-to-speech app with annunciation codes

Tim Murray2 wrote:

The App Store has a gazillion text-to-speech apps

That's too bad. Sounds like a good idea, and pretty easy to implement. But I wouldn't want to build one myself if there are a gazillion text-to-speech apps.

I don't want to spend a dollar here and $10 there experimenting with a bunch of them.

Any ideas?

Do you remember the name of that old app?

It sounds like you're describing the really old embedded speech commands. Those date from the old MacOS days. They aren't supported anymore. The modern standard is the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML). I think if you look for an app that explicitly supported that standard, it should do what you want.

Ideally, look for an app that supports both the SSML and some version of embedded commands. Those embedded commands would obviously be easier to use than the XML-based SSML. However, you want a decent app, not something that's junk. So you'll have to make sure it supports SSML. It looks like Apple's speech synthesis APIs do support SSML since macOS 13. So any app that isn't using that is obviously junk. A decent app would support SSML, while also realizing that no rational end user would want to use SSML.